An information providing system including an in-vehicle apparatus mounted to a vehicle and a management apparatus installed to an external information center is known. In the system, the in-vehicle apparatus and the management apparatus communicate with each other, thereby providing facility-event information, which is information about a facility or an event, to a user.
In this kind of information providing system, the management apparatus extracts the facility-event information, e.g., the facility-event information that matches a condition “within a radius of X km from the present position”, from a database and transmits the extracted facility-event information. The in-vehicle apparatus receives the facility-event information from the management apparatus, and provides the facility-event information to the user (cf. Patent Document 1 for example).
Patent Document 1: JP-2008-293102A
Discussion will be given based on findings of the inventor of the present application.
In a conventional information providing system, although the facility-event information corresponding to a facility or an event located near the present position of a vehicle can be provided to a user, it is doubtful whether this facility-event information is useful to the user because this facility-event information is merely extracted according to a distance-based search scope.
Specifically, the facility-event information provided to a user in a conventional information providing system may include information that is unwanted despite “within a radius of X km from the present position”. Alternatively, the facility-event information provided to a user may fail to include information that is useful despite “X km or more distant from the present position”.